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Anka Muhlstein: Monsieur Proust's Library

Tuesday November 20, 201207:00 pm

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Anka Muhlstein, one of the Center for Fiction's favorite speakers came back to talk about her new book, Monsieur Proust's Library.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.

In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing not only a friendly introduction to the momentous In Search of Lost Time, but also exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

Anka Muhlstein was born in Paris in 1935. She spent the war years in New York City and returned to France in 1945. She moved back to New York with her two sons from a previous marriage, Robert and Stéphane Dujarric, when she married Louis Begley in 1974. She has published ten books of biographies and essays. She has been awarded the Goncourt prize of Biography and has twice received the History Prize of the French Academy. Her work has beentranslated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and Polish. Her published works include La Femme Soleil, Victoria, James de Rothschild, Manhattan, Cavelier de La Salle, Napoléon á Moscou, Garçon, un cent d’huîtres, Balzac et la Table, and Venedig Unter Vier Augen.